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NLA News - homeOctober 2005 Volume XVI Number 1


CALENDAR

OF EVENTS

Celebrating:
Inga Clendinnen

Date: Sunday 30 October
Time: 2 pm
Venue: Theatre
Cost: Free admission, donations to the National Library Treasures Gallery welcome
Bookings essential:
(02) 6262 1698

 

The Canberra Series:
The Cultured Country
with Don Aitken

Date: Wednesday 19 October
Time: 12:30 pm
Venue: Ferguson Room
Cost: Free admission, donations to the National Library Treasures Gallery
welcome
Booking essential:
(02) 6262 1698

 

For bookings, details of membership and subscriptions, contact:
Friends of the NLA
National Library of Australia
Parkes Place
CANBERRA  ACT  2600
Tel: (02) 6262 1698
Fax: (02) 6273 4493
Email: friends@nla.gov.au
Web site: www.nla.gov.au/friend

October Friends

Every year the Friends of the National Library honour through their Celebration event the work of someone who has contributed significantly to the creation of books and book culture in Australia. This year, following the annual voting process by the Friends of the National Library Committee, the recipient of the award is Inga Clendinnen.

Inga Clendinnen is a writer, academic and historian whose work on Aztec and Mayan cultures has been praised around the world. In recent years she has turned her attention to new topics, and again has received critical acclaim. Reading the Holocaust (Text Publishing, 1998) won the New South Wales Premier’s History Award and was also nominated by the New York Times in 1999 as one of the 10 best books of the year. In Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir (Text Publishing, 2000), Inga Clendinnen explores her own history. She dramatises the ways in which illness challenges and subverts the self, and explores how writing can become part of the imperative to recover.

Her most recent book, Dancing with Strangers (Text Publishing, 2003), tells the story of what happened between the British settlers of New South Wales and the Indigenous peoples they found there. In 2004 it was awarded the prestigious Kiriyama Prize for non-fiction, as well as the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award.

The Library’s Celebration honouring Inga Clendinnen’s work will take place at 2 pm on Sunday 30 October at the National Library of Australia. If you would like to attend the Celebration, please call Hayley in the Friends Office (phone number below) to make a booking. A publication to mark the event and honour Inga Clendinnen’s work will be produced and distributed to all Friends.

Also in October, on Wednesday 19 at 12.30 pm, we have a lunchtime talk by Professor Don Aitken, on his new book The Cultured Country. How did Australia shift from its blinkered, conservative, colonial, defensive state in 1950 to become a well-educated, curious, artistically creative, musical society 50 years later—and how can we keep it that way? Well, I’m not going to miss that one either!

If you’d like to ensure a place at either or both of these popular events, please book with Hayley, on (02) 6262 1698.

Wow, and there are still two months of 2005 to go!

JILLIAN EDWARDS
Acting Executive Officer
Friends of the National Library of Australia

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